Riding in an open car in Dallas that day. Photo from NJ.com
By Paul and Eileen Goldfinger
I was a freshman medical student in the fall of 1962 at the George Washington University School of Medicine. The med school was in a downtrodden neighborhood around 14th Street and H. There was a strip joint around the corner and a tiny park across the street where homeless people would hang out. It was a 19th century brick building, 3 stories high, and it even had an amphitheatre like the photographs or paintings of autopsies or surgeries from that era.
Being in Washington produced a number of special memories, but one was how the President would ride around in an open car when a visiting dignitary from another country was visiting. The government would close down some offices at lunchtime to allow a crowd to be on the streets for a small motorcade to drive around and create an event. The two of them would wave to the crowds.
We would be let out of anatomy lab for a short time to go out to the nearby intersection. We would join the crowd while wearing our formaldehyde-smelly white lab coats. Small flags from both countries were handed out to the crowd, and we would wave ours while onlookers would move away from us.
One year later, on November 22, 1963, I was about to enter a classroom for a bacteriology final exam. We were told that the President had been shot, but no other information was available. The test was not cancelled. While we were taking the exam, the professor wrote on the blackboard, “The President is dead.” Nevertheless, despite the distraction, we had to complete the test.
That day, Eileen, a coed at GW in Foggy Bottom, was in class when the professor announced the news. Classes were cancelled. That night, at about 10 pm, she, along with her roommate and a friend, went to the Capital to join the huge “solemn line” waiting to enter the Rotunda.
Waiting to get in. Internet photo
They were there all night and finally they got in the next morning, just for a few moments, to view the coffin. They felt “awed” that they were “part of history as it’s being written.” They experienced “a sort of disbelief” that they were actually there.
Inside the Capital Rotunda. Internet photo
I never saw any open car motorcades after that day. Still security in the neighborhood was not very evident. I lived on 16th street which runs into the White House. We often walked by the White House and could peer through the iron fence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Eileen liked to see if she could spot the pony–Macaroni—or any members of the family. Traffic drove by as if it were just an ordinary street.
At St. Elizabeth Hospital, a now closed psych facility, I got to interview “White House cases.” These were paranoid schizophrenics who were detained after trying to get to the President at the White House, either to kill him or tell him about a plot. It was a sort of patient that med students only got to see in Washington, D.C. We took Eileen’s parents to see the grounds at St E’s, and her dad said, “You have to be nuts to come here.” It’s too bad they didn’t catch Oswald in time.
LONDON FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA. Music played at the Pres. Kennedy funeral. Intermezzo from “Cavalleria Rusticana” by Pietro Mascagni.
Paul and Eileen at the Washington DC zoo. May, 1963. Photographer: some guy passing by (He shook the camera.Where was Cartier Bresson when we needed him?)
